THE EGGS FRUCTIFIED IN THE CELL. 61 



drone. We have known a queen bee lay from fifteen to 

 twenty eggs in a quarter of an hour, and consequently, we 

 have only two hypotheses to guide us ; either, that an act of 

 coition takes place between the deposition of every egg, or 

 that a number of eggs are fructified at one time, as it were, 

 by wholesale. The former comes scarcely within the range 

 of possibility, and is at direct variance with experience. We 

 have examined a hive under every relation and circumstance, 

 and we never yet succeeded in entrapping the queen in the 

 state of actual coition with the drone *. But we have suc- 

 ceeded in several instances in detecting the drone with his 

 body in a cell, and on cutting out that part of the comb, we 

 always found the egg at the bottom of the cell, and the 

 seminal fluid enveloping it. We submitted this fluid, which 

 was of a whitish hue, to a powerful microscope, and we ob- 

 served a number of animalculee floating in it, of the annexed 

 ^ form. It thus became, as it were, demonstrated 



ffi^iiW'fo'* t0 ns > tna * n0 sexual intercourse takes place 

 'k f, A;' t V' t °° <f between the queen and the drone, but that the 

 tt <o e gg i s fructified in the cell, after its deposi- 

 tion. We, however, by no means arrogate to ourselves, 

 the merit of this discovery, for it is but the confirmation 

 of the discovery of Debraw, and others, who have shown 



* Liittichau, a German apiarian, expresses his doubt of the act of copulation 

 taking place in the open air, although he does not positively deny the fact ; but 

 he asserts, with the greatest confidence, that he has actually viewed it in the 

 hive, and that he once stuck the queen with a needle, during the act of 

 coition, and on examination, he found the organ of generation of the drone 

 in the queen. We have only one remark to make on the above statement, 

 which is, that as Liittichau is the only person who ever witnessed the act of 

 coition between the queen and the drone, we are not inclined to consider the 

 fact as verified. Scopoli, also a German apiarian, whose work on bees is 

 written in Latin, and translated by Meidinger, for the purpose of arriving at 

 the truth or fallacy of the queen being fecundated in the open air, cut the 

 wings of the queen at the commencement of the spring, and in the autumn 

 he found the same queen in the hive. Two excellent swarms had been ob- 

 tained during the summer, and although he was not an advocate for the 

 system of the copulation of the drone with the queen in the hive, the above 

 experiment convinced him that it did not take place in the open air. 

 D 3 



